Farm 2 Neighbors Breaks Through With New Documentary, Biggest Market Yet

The hulking swines oinked and snorted, pumping their powerful legs as they darted back and forth across the grassy plane. The cameraman gaped at those impressive little beasts, then trained his lens on them with frenzied excitement. Erica Huang looked on and smiled. This was the side of the organic food movement that she wanted the cameraman and his audience to see: not only the farmers markets and rows upon rows of healthy produce, but also the vibrant free range animals – situated as nearby as Beijing’s outskirts – from which those vendors take their meat. 

“The cameraman that came with me to the mountains, to visit the pig farm, was so thrilled. He’d never been to the countryside outside of Beijing,” Huang, the founder of the beloved weekly Farm 2  Neighbors market (typically held at Modernista on Sundays and which will have a special Oct 1-2 run at 751D Park Bridge as part of Beijing Design week), recalls of the shoot that she was the subject of as part of the popular Yi Ge Ren De Yi Tian /一个人的一天 online documentary series. 

Yi Ge Ren De Yi Tian has gained a massive online audience – averaging 500,000 viewers per episode - thanks to director, editor, and host Zhang Rao (张尧) and his team’s intimate, highly relatable renderings of Beijingers’ everyday lives. Huang has, like him, built a fledging DIY following of her own, and she feels that both the series, and especially the episode dedicated to her work for the Capital’s most popular farmers market, reflect the growing vibrancy of our city’s various subcultures. 

“For each episode, he usually shoots ordinary people and shows how their lives are interesting, like a subway worker and what he does on an ordinary day, things like that,” Huang says of Zhang, adding: “I think my episode shows how someone like me is an ordinary person too, how not everyone is an office worker. And hopefully it can inspire others to be creative in their own daily lives.”

Starring in a segment of such a widely watched documentary series will surely broaden Farm 2 Neighbors’ clientele beyond its already burgeoning, health conscious expat fanbase. And Huang is now preparing for another breakthrough: at 45 vendors, the Beijing Design Week installment of Farm 2 Neighbors’ will be, by far, its biggest showing yet. Huang hopes those stalls – serving fresh organic food, handmade apparel, and much more – will help her reach a wider Chinese community that is longing to buy local, but isn’t sure how. 

“I want more people to see that ‘organic’ isn’t just a false label that is slapped on food to make it more expensive. I want them to see that you can actually come to the market and get to know our farmers and vendors,” Huang says, adding: “I want to not only show people what the term ‘organic’ means, I also want them to see this lifestyle and this exciting community.”

The Farm 2 Neighbors episode of Yi Ge Ren De Yi Tian can be viewed here, and Farm 2 Neighbors’ Beijing Design Week event will be held at 751D Park Bridge on Oct 1-2 from 11am-5pm. Entry is RMB 30, including a cash coupon of RMB 15. For more information on Beijing Design Weeks’ other events, click here.

Photos courtesy of Erica Huang/Yi Ge Ren De Yi Tian